“Lending a hand”: the well-intentioned work of a non-profit organisation on the outskirts of neoliberal Lisbon

Abstract

This paper focuses on the mental health of two immigrants supported by a non-profit organisation on the outskirts of Lisbon, Dona Lígia and Albino1. The ethnography sets out the discourse of these users who are also residents of Terraços da Ponte, a social housing neighbourhood, and the workers who try to help them in the context of the non-profit organisation's endeavours.Using semi-directive interviews, life stories and data collected during eleven months of intensive ethnographic fieldwork, the intersections between the non-profit's users and its employees are presented and critically discussed in this article. The space and conditions which these individuals inhabit, as well as the history of the old Quinta do Mocho (the slum where they used to live before being rehoused in the new neighbourhood), are central in the analysis of how local subjectivities are formed and negotiated. The paper shows that interventions merely focused on trying to 'lend a hand' may do more harm than good to the communities, because the efforts employed by these non-profits disregard the causes producing illness and suffering in the first place. Governing the nation, one household at a timeQuinta do Mocho was considered for decades as one of the largest informal neighbourhoods in the country. Located in Loures, a municipality in the Metropolitan Area of Lisbon, it was inhabited by almost four thousand individuals, most of them adult and of African origin. When in 1974 a residential project at Quinta do Mocho was suddenly abandoned without being completed due to the insolvency of the real estate company responsible for the construction of these buildings, its first inhabitants began to arrive. The influx of residents skyrocketed in the early nineties, a period of increasing need of unskilled labourers for public works. Seeking to 1 The identity of the users, the non-profit and its workers are protected by the use of pseudonyms. All the participants willingly contributed to this study and gave formal consent.

“I Don’t Have the Nerve to Tell These People That I Cannot Help Them!”: Vulnerability, Ethnography, and Good Intentions

“…These compassionate efforts employed by the former interns, which involved staying until very late on Food Bank days and taking on the heavy work of loading and unloading, without any help, the van rented only for this purpose, was coincident with the logic of "lending a hand" [33] prevalent when they worked officially for the nonprofit organization. The compassion, the moral imperative that was above any other narrative was now the only one that subsisted when everything else at HDP seemed to crumble in the face of financial collapse.…”

“…Furthermore, the dependence of external financiers, make these institutions closer to the mentality of the donors, of which they are usually unaware of, than that of the vulnerable communities, acting as state replacements or liaisons on a local level [31,32], unexpectedly popular in neoliberal or austerity contexts. This compassion that moves them to lend a hand [33], to label their clients as "vulnerable", and to use the jargon that makes them worthy competitors in the funding race, corresponds to a practice of doing good that is hardly criticized [15].…”